Message from cwatson

[Anonymous]

I want to thank Miranda Ko and Professor Dube for providing such a wonderful dinner.

Tonight's session was a review of some of the sessions from spring 2009 USC East Asia forum. Of particular interest to me was how technologically advanced China was - only to
regress due to internal political strife - perhaps now they want to take their "rightful place" as an international, technological giant.

In my classroom, I want to show my students the picture of the Chinese ships, compared with Columbus' ships - it was a very compelling picture.

A few historians and economists cite the rise of East Asia as a prelude to the decline of power in the West. The shift will be a long and arduous adjustment for Westerners - especially the US - who has enjoyed some 60 years of being a superpower.

However, this uneasy shift of global dominance will present challenges to East Asian countries as well. For instance, in Japan, some people are imagining a more culturally mixed society with non-Asians and Southeastern Asians, while Japanese conservatives simply want to populate Japan with Japanese families. Conservatives see this strong Japan as one in which those of Japanese decent immigrate to Japan. ("Don't Bring me your Huddled Masses" The Economist 12/30/08.)

South Korea has to contend with a declining birth rate (Choi, Seon-jeong, "Korea's Planned Parenthood Promoting Births? Why?", MercatorNet.com 7/4/09) and the possibility of a united Korea where low skilled North Koreans may have to be absorbed into a highly technologically advanced society in the South. South Korea middle income society with a thread of a social safety net, could not accomplish the same feat as West Germany who slowly integrated both East and West Germany after the fall of the Berlin Wall in October 1989. ("The Odd Couple" The Economist, 9/25/08.)

And, in the mother of all economic powerhouses, China may be subtly sabotaging its own future. As one commentator on MSN.com (10/27/09) stated (I am paraphasing), "China's development in the next 15 years will equal that of the US which took 200 years to attain."
Declining rainfall, due to climate change (according to scientists), is drying up wells and reservoirs along with water-intensive crops such as winter wheat. The water table continues to fall since the 1970s which dries out wetlands and rivers. China has a smaller water supply than the US with five times as many people (1.3 billion as of 2009).

As a solution, Mao's vision of borrowing water from the Yangtze for the north was too simple for scientists and engineers who debated about it for decades before it was approved in 2002.

Today, the demand for water is far greater in the North and water pollution is rampant in the south. Forty-one percent of China's wastewater is dumped in the Yangtze. Mr. Yang compared China's pollution problems with that of the US in the 1920s and 1930s. Thus, for all of China's exponential development, its problems have increased just as quickly.
(Jim Yardley, "Beneath Booming Cities, China's Future is Drying Up," New York Times, 9/28/07.)

Overall, China should not be viewed as a threat to the US since their challenges
(in some ways) have mirrored ours - albeit in a shorter time period. For whatever adaptations the US has to make for the shifting of power to the East, they must meet us part of the way since our global economy requires transnational interdependence.

Cheryl Watson